Gérard Depardieu Ruined My Day

Vincent calls me around noon. “I stayed out very late last night at a wine tasting,” he says.

“And now you’re too hung over to go to work,” I surmise.

“It’s an occupational hazard,” he concedes.

Vincent owns a wine shop around the corner from my house. Occasionally, in a dire situation such as this, he will call and ask me to work a shift for him. I don’t mind at all—I can always use the extra money, and you never know what sort of people you’ll meet or what interactions you’ll have. Working at a wine shop is great, except for one slight hitch: I know absolutely nothing about wine.

Arriving at the shop, I unlock the door and enter. Once inside, I pause for a moment to appreciate the placid silence. The job is the exact opposite of my other sporadic employment, teaching art classes at an elementary school. At the wine shop, you arrive to a moment of quiet solitude within which you can relax and center yourself. At the school, you enter the front gate and it is only a matter of seconds before a seven-year-old is screaming your name and clambering on to your leg. Still, the interactions with the kids are so much more straightforward than the stilted, choreographed conversations with the adults. With kids, it is important to be thoughtful and honest; with adults, it is imperative to lie convincingly, coddle their egos, and deliver a continuous flow of pseudo-informed bullshit.

There are two kinds of customers in a wine shop. You have the people who don’t know about wine and want guidance—for instance, wives who are planning a dinner for their husband’s boss and want an expert to reassure them. Then there are the connoisseurs, who already know what they are looking for but want to joust with you and show off their opinionated knowledge. Obviously, dealing with the first type is much easier. In this scenario, both parties want things to work out: the insecure buyer is eager to believe, and all the seller has to do is act self-assured. With the connoisseurs it is a bit trickier. I usually defer to their wisdom, open a bottle and ask them to tell me what they think. The deferential strategy tends to go over pretty well.

The first customers of the day are a French couple. They are disappointed that Vincent is not in, but she asks eagerly, “You speak French as well?” I do not speak any French. Their disappointment deepens.

“We are looking for a champagne,” she tells me, while he looks around the shop with haughty detachment. I lurch into my improvisational wine guy routine, gesturing grandly with my arms and nodding sagely as I pull bottles from the shelves. These are tough customers to navigate, because she is giving me the helpless vibe and he is giving me the know-it-all vibe. Which tact should I go with it? I decide on a combination. “This is a fine sparkling wine, fruity and robust,” I say. “Would you like me to open a bottle?”

She looks at me with concern. “No thank you, it’s a bit early in the day,” she mutters.

I strike out several more times with my recommendations. The Frenchman eventually ceases to even make eye contact with me. He has seen through my charade and is enraged. The wife continues to banter, trying to smooth the situation over and placate the boiling cauldron that is her snooty husband. I seize on an inspiration.

“How about a Gerard Depardieu?” I say. Not many people realize that this famous French actor is also a vintner. His sparkling wines are not half bad, or so I’ve heard. I hold the bottle forth, hoping the evocation of a countryman will produce the desired effect, and reverse the blockage of capital flow. Instead, the husband erupts in a rage. “No! No! No!” he screams. He begins vigorously berating me. His frazzled wife delivers a running translation of the diatribe: “He does not like Gerard Depardieu… ever since Depardieu supported Sarkozy in the elections… you know, Sarkozy has very bad views on immigration….”

Great, I think, now I’m being accused of affronting this man with racist wine. “It is true that Depardieu made some good films early in his career,” she concedes diplomatically, trying to smooth things over. But it is too late. My wine shop proprietor ruse has been 100 percent dismantled, and the Frenchman, his stream of outrage exhausted, storms out of the door in a huff. “Renard!” she wails, following him out, turning to give me one last withering glance before she exits.

The rest of the day goes badly. Having been thrown off my stride, I am unable to pull myself together and deliver a convincing performance. The life of the faker is not an easy one. Dealing with children really is a lot easier than dealing with adults.

In the late afternoon, another woman comes into the shop looking for champagne. She pulls a bottle from the rack, and holds it up for me to see. “Excuse me,” she asks. “Is this THE Gerard Depardieu? The actor?”

“Yes, it is,” I say wearily. “But listen, I have to warn you, Depardieu supported Sarkozy in the last election. That champagne is right wing.”

She gives me a cold, disapproving glance. “I don’t follow politics,” she says. Then she gets on her cell phone to call her husband for advice. He advises her to go with the Depardieu, apparently. As I wrap the bottle, she says, “Depardieu made some very good films early in his career. To be honest, I don’t know much about wine. It was the name that sold me.”